Jon Stewart's early reaction to the Trump (and Republican) election win was pretty good, I think: don't pay too much attention to the pundits' early rush to assess the alleged "lessons" of an election. It takes a while to do any decent analysis, and anyway, a party that can look in a great condition after one election can be severely humbled in the next, making rushed views of how a party is going wrong look very dubious in retrospect.
There were also some silly Lefty twitter accounts claiming that the total vote count indicated 20 million votes were "missing" - ignoring the fact that the vote was far from completed in California and many other states.
The Washington Post's Aaron Blake correctly argues that we shouldn't get too carried away with how big the win was (which was always my impression too):
....what about Trump’s earlier and related claim — that his and the GOP’s mandate was “unprecedented and powerful?”
Unprecedented: Surely not.
Powerful: That’s more subjective. But it’s evidently not that powerful, historically speaking.
While Trump’s win was larger than many expected and every swing state swung in his favor, his level of support is relatively par for the course for a victor. And Republicans on the whole didn’t do as well as he did.
It’s all worth diving into, given the major questions about whether Trump and the GOP will actually pursue some of the extreme proposals he has pitched on the campaign trail — and given that his and his party’s mandate, both perceived and real, will play a role in what lies ahead.
As things stand, Trump probably will sweep the seven swing states, but he will do so with only marginally more electoral votes (probably 312) than he won in 2016 (304) and President Joe Biden won in 2020 (306).
That 312 total would also outpace both of George W. Bush’s elections, but it’s fewer than in any election involving Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush or Ronald Reagan. And the 58 percent of electoral votes Trump probably will win would rank 41st all-time.
The other key measure here is the popular vote, which has no bearing on who is actually elected but does say something about their support nationwide.
Trump is currently taking 50.9 percent of the popular vote and leading Vice President Kamala Harris by 3.3 points. That will shift as the remaining votes are counted, but it seems Trump will actually win the popular vote this time, which he didn’t do when he won the 2016 election.
At the same time, his popular-vote share probably will drop as the remaining (mostly western and largely Californian) votes are counted. It’s likely he’ll win a smaller percentage of the popular vote than any non-Trump president-elect since 2000, when George W. Bush won despite losing the popular vote. A big question is whether he could wind up shy of a popular majority.
The rest is worth reading too - he points out that the Senate and (possible) House majorities are not going to be huge.
OK, with that said, I will comment on some of the early MAGA commentary on Twitter: a very large number are referring to the culture wars, with "woke ideology" and trans advocacy in particular. There is no doubt that trans issues played a significant role in the minds of the MAGA crowd (apparently there were a lot of ads about it on their social media, as well as Trump making nonsense statements about kids going to school and arriving home having changed sex - one of his "not literally, but seriously" moments, I guess).
As I have suggested before, I do consider this a Lefty weakness and blind spot. Social media has made it dead easy to show that there are (what would appear to be) many older "transwomen" who act as if it is primarily a sexual fetish for them, and it's pretty hard to build public sympathy if that is the motivation for being trans. Furthermore, the genitally intact male who insists he can compete against women and its fair just doesn't pass "the pub test" as we would say in Australia. It would pay for Democrats to acknowledge limits on the extent of support for "trans rights", because I reckon the tide has turned and will continue to do so while America spends a few years in lawfare from "de-transitioners", which is the ridiculously clumsy way America chooses so often to revise policy approaches.
That said, it's pretty impossible to assess the degree to which this would be a deciding factor for anyone - it's more likely that a element of a suite of sentiments which is impossible to separate.
As to the other sentiments - another post is coming!
3 comments:
A wild card idea.
Typically the right are perceived as keepers of the status quo. Trump isn't like that, he challenges convention. In this election it has been the left as the keeper for the status quo.
It isn't just MAGAs who wanted big changes in society. There are increasing numbers of people who recognise that modern economics works fine for the top end of town and nowhere else. Big profits, share market booming, inflation doesn't matter except it creates profit gouging opportunities, big profits to be made in housing(In the USA the rental market is a corporte activity not an individual investor activity). The Woke stuff has to go, the Voice is a good example of how the talking heads are divorced from the general public. It was already on the wane though and the trans issue had very much fallen off th public radar. I think trans issues represented the last straw of tolerance towards woke demands that the rest of us must bend over backwards to accommodate a tiny minority.
The Dems have become the conservatives, MAGAs are the progressives.
The Left is piling on Harris but the failure lies with the Dems failing to recognise that Biden was done and a new contender should have been preprared from 2020 onwards.
It’s not so complicated. Trump has one all theee elections and the last one was a coup. Having failed on every front, and having failed to murder Trump or jail him, the same people felt it too risky to retain total control by doing the same coup twice. There is not much else to analyse. Except your own belligerent irrationality.
I am very confident that there will be a blue wave in the next mid terms.
The tariffs are a disaster and deporting so many people is also but costs a hellva lot, billions not millions. Add Trump's severely declining cognitive powers, his utter stupidity , chaos and now add hubris
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